"It's going to be a big void," festival producer Clay Fuller told The Oregonian at the time. "He was very quick with the quip that would blow your mind and was a wonderful person to spend time with."

Another deeply felt loss came this May with Janice Scroggins, the talented keyboardist and Oregon Music Hall of Famer who'd played with nearly every blues, jazz and gospel musician in town. She was just 58.

"Janice Scroggins was one of the most talented musicians I’ve ever known," Terry Currier, of Music Millennium and the music hall of fame, wrote. "You could really feel it with Janice playing. She was one of a kind and I will miss her."

And on June 23, Mel Solomon, 80, passed nearly two months after going off dialysis. Though wheelchair-bound for years, the singer continued to perform -- even if only for the other residents of the Marquis Piedmont assisted living center, with the help of musicians such as Norman Sylvester and Rob Shoemaker. He played the blues festival several times over his decades in Portland, including a 2000 appearance that found him sneaking out of the hospital after a hip replacement to make it to the stage.

Yet as some artists have left us, others have done their best to move forward.

Scroggins would've appeared at the blues festival with her friend Linda Hornbuckle, playing in the latter's Old Time Gospel Hour. Hornbuckle continues to face health difficulties of her own: She's battling cancer and started another round of chemotherapy in December. As it is for many musicians, her medical fight has been a financial struggle as well, and she has been accepting donations via OnPoint Community Credit Union to make her health insurance payments.

Thara Memory, the famed jazz educator who helped bring Esperanza Spalding to the world, will play the Blues Festival for the first time with his student-driven big band, the American Music Program Youth Orchestra. He too, has fought health problems in recent years, losing fingers and part of his right leg to diabetes. But he hasn't put down his trumpet.

Other festival veterans have faced down illness and kept going. Curtis Salgado, now 60, played the first-ever blues festival -- then the Rose City Blues Festival -- in 1987. Salgado beat a cancer scare in 2006 but came back as strong as ever, winning awards and acclaim for 2012 album "Soul Shot."

"He's still singing as well as he probably has ever," says Peter Dammann, the blues festival's artistic director and a musician himself. But the audience, too, is aging with its heroes. Speaking about Portland's blues history, Dammann recalled the thriving days of the '90s, when many musicians could count on weekly gigs across town and up and down I-5, but times are changing. "A lot of this crowd, this scene is aging. And the rugged lifestyle that a lot of us have led by choice or by not by choice, has caught up with some of us."

Bluesmen and -women all over are getting older: even B.B. King, 88, has struggled at recent performances, and Memphis' in-progress Blues Hall of Fame has been pushing full-steam ahead to celebrate the lives of its icons while they're here to see it. That's not to say that there won't be newcomers at the Blues Festival: Artists such as "Blind Boy" Paxton and Portland's Liz Vice will be there to represent for the next generation. But as you take in the waterfront this year, take the time to appreciate those who've come before them -- and those we still have.